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Notes -
Baphomet Has Fallen
How much good faith is required for an American state government respecting a religion's symbols?
The Satanic Temple, specifically the Satanic Temple of Iowa, put a statue depicting the pagan idol Baphomet in the Iowa Capitol, following the letter of the law allowing religious symbols. Thing is, it's explicitly an atheistic (or rather "non-theistic") religion; they have as much belief in the reality of Baphomet as they do the Flying Spaghetti Monster (mHNAty). They use literary symbols and provocative symbols to promote science and promote humanist atheist goals of tolerance and justice. It was designed to provoke a response, and it has; a Christian broke it. Deseret News reports that:
The state of Iowa finds itself in the position of avenging the rights of atheists to display a pagan idol they don't even believe in, which mocks people of genuine Christian faith with a dark symbol drawn from mythology.
Take that to its logical conclusion.
A Christian church could create a parallel object to be installed in the Iowa Capitol, a similar deliberately provocative anti-atheist symbol to be promoted as a sacred symbol of a pseudo-atheist "Church of the Human Condition" which exposes the failures and tragedies of the Enlightenment and promotes learning how to morally philosophize using the Jefferson Bible and select readings from Ayn Rand in after-school clubs. I can think of a few:
Desecrating any of these would bear the same fourth-degree criminal mischief charges, with up to a year in prison and a $2,560 fine, and exposure to lawsuits by the artists and owners of the symbols.
But aside from the turnabout, I'd like to remind that atheism is treated as a religion de facto by its adherents and proselytes, and de jure by the government in having Freedom of Religion under the First Amendment. Anyone who says it is not a religion must, by implication, accept that the broken Baphomet statue is only a violation of Freedom of Expression (under the same Amendment) so any cries of Christian hypocrisy at its destruction are inaccurate on their face due to the uneven parallel. Only by accepting that atheism is a religion can atheists claim a sacred right to offend Christians.
Your list of things to trigger and own the atheists betrays a complete lack of understanding of non-theist world views.
You are holding up a list of things that exist as though they are the same thing as a given religions idols (the cross, the prophet, the tablets, etc) when the whole point of atheism is that there is no such thing as an idol.
If you are a committed christian (or theist in general, I guess) your reality requires lots of maintenance. You have to believe in things for their own, not believe in other things because that would endanger the things you do believe in, hold things sacred for no reason other than because they are, abore things that are aborent for no reason other than that they are.
Atheists don't have to do that: they just have to not respect and privilege your personal reality over the shared reality that is the material world. Religion is the practice of having faith in things you can't deduce through empiricism, atheism is a rejection of faith, and anti-theism considers faith the be a type of negative utility delusion.
There is no special claim atheists have to uphold or special symbol they have to respect. All they need to do is shrug.
What sort of reality maintenance do you have in mind, here?
Do you believe in free will?
I can, empirically, observe and interact with my will on a minute-to-minute basis. I can gather it, direct it, strengthen or weaken it. My interactions with it are nearly as inescapable as my interactions with gravity.
It is routine for me to observe Atheists arguing that Free Will does not exist. They admit that this belief makes no testable predictions, that one should act in every way as though it existed, and yet assume that it does not. They explain that this is because, under Materialist assumptions, it can't exist. They do this despite a considerable history of their forebears making confident predictions for something like two centuries that the will's nonexistence could be demonstrated and used for basic engineering of people, only to have all those claims falsified; the current position is the "determinism of the gaps" that they have retreated to.
It seems logical that they wouldn't pick a fight on such poor terms if they had a choice. If Materialism demands that free will not exist, then evidence of free will is evidence that Materialism is wrong. We each have a lot of evidence that free will exists.
The above, to me, looks like a pretty good example of "reality maintenance". What do you have in mind?
I don't believe in free will in a mystical sense as a motive force that comes from nothing and goes nowhere; so I don't believe in free will the way you mean it.
People can make decisions, but those decisions aren't free. They are constrained by physics and history. This can be observed by the fact I can't simply will myself into the air, and instead have to jump.
A question for you: do you believe in cause and effect? That every effect is preceded by a cause?
If so, isn't free will an incoherent concept?
The chain of observable cause and effect seems reliable within the observable universe, back to the origination point of the universe. Past that point, we cannot observe further. Our understanding of physics precludes a looping universe under observable conditions, so we can be highly confident that cause and effect, as an observable chain of evidence, break in at least one point.
It is possible that significant portions of physics do in fact loop seamlessly, and the remaining portion of the loop is simply unobservable to us. Alternatively, it is possible we are in a simulation, or we are boltzmann brains, or a god of some description created the universe. All these possibilities, and any others that might be contained beyond the back wall of the observable universe, are neither observable nor falsifiable. Given that they are neither observable nor falsifiable, it seems obvious to me that one cannot form beliefs about them based on evidence, since that evidence does not exist. Based on what we do know, that something cannot come from nothing, it seems reasonable to do so as one pleases, but it likewise seems obvious to me that none of these explanations are "Materialistic", in the sense that is commonly meant. None are observable, none are falsifiable, none can even be adequately defined for a valid comparison.
We can be quite confident that there is something to know, and we can be equally confident that we don't know it.
Incoherent how? What process of Free Will specifically gives rise to this incoherence? It appears to me to operate seamlessly and ubiquitously throughout each of our lives; certainly it has done so within my own decades of life. It appears to be simply what it claims to be: the individual, fine-grained capacity to choose actions, intentions, attention, focus, even various forms of mental state such as mood. The process of choice can be directly observed, manipulated, even engineered within oneself.
To the extent that Materialist priors argue that this apparent reality cannot be the case, the observable and ubiquitous fact of free will is strong evidence against Materialism. Of course, Materialism is free to present evidence to the contrary, to demonstrate that free will is, in fact, an illusion. Materialists attempted to do so for roughly two centuries, and now they've given up and admitted that their best strategy is to claim it only appears to exist in every observable and testable way, but is nonetheless fake despite all evidence to the contrary. That does not seem to me to be what "simply following the evidence" looks like, but then, it is obvious to me that beliefs are chosen, not forced, which seems to explain the behavior quite well.
You say materialists have given up, but isn't it the opposite?
Materialism has become the base state that all other claims need to beat to be considered; and the strongest free will claim is especially weird.
Re. incoherent: you are describing compatibilism, which is what I hold: there is no free will in a mystical, 'my decision are unconstrained in some essential way' but there is free will in practice.
EG, I think that you are absolutely constrained by your history and the nature of experiencing time as a three dimensional creature. When you can choose, you only choose one thing and looking at it from a 4th dimensional perspective, you could imagine your life as a written narrative. That said, you still experience free will and I believe that free will as a concept still exists. Just because every decision you will ever make and have ever made could only have been made as you made them, doesn't mean those decision still didn't happen.
Basically, if you refer solely to the experience of free will, then yes it exists. If you claim that you can make a decision that isn't wholly the result of your nature and your history, what the fuck does that even mean?
On this specific issue, no. Two centuries' worth of previous Materialists made bold, highly falsifiable claims about the non-existence of free will. Such claims served as the theoretical basis for multiple revolutionary ideologies, as well as dominating the field of Psychology for decades. These claims were thoroughly falsified, but their intellectual polution continues to inflict harm to this day.
More generally, also no. Hard Materialism is not observably verifiable, and is not required to conduct scientific or engineering pursuits. It seems to me that even many people who self-identify as "Hard Materialists" are not actually hard materialists, any more than people who attend church on Christmas are "Christians".
Okay. What novel, falsifiable predictions does this idea allow you to make? Can you actually predict or manipulate what people will do, the way you can predict and manipulate a screwdriver or some other piece of dumb matter?
What part of it is confusing? What falsifiable predictions does claiming otherwise allow you to make, that can't be made equally well without claiming otherwise? Skinner claimed that if you gave him control of a child's environment, he could make that child into anything he wanted. He and his disciples tried and failed. Marx claimed that the revolutionary reorganization of society would create New Soviet Men, thus solving crime and war and poverty forever. He and his disciples created half a world of horror and despair. Do you think you can do better? Does observing a pattern of failed predictions shift your priors, or is that just for claims one does not personally favor?
Aren't all those objections kinda pointless? Also, why are you talking about Skinner and Marx? Shouldn't you be talking about Nietzsche and Schopenhauer?
I can't make those predictions, because it is impossible for me to have that information. But the information exists, and the events happen.
I am making the non special claim that all matter behaves as matter, and all energy behaves as energy. Basically, that there are no special cases. If you are making the strong claim for free will, you are claiming that all matter behaves as matter, and all energy behaves as energy; except for the bit that is inside the skulls of humans.
Why should I believe this strong claim, and how do you back it up?
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I don't see how materialists being a little too ahead of themselves 200 years ago should discredit materialism forever and ever. Do you also consider parachutes discredited because 500 years ago people tried them and crashed?
What is your model of a free will? Is it supposed to be outside of brain function? From where I'm looking, the thought, the choice and the effect of them on the body are all very much vulnerable to external influence, and your only recourse is that they are not yet influenceable with 100% precision.
In the first place, it's not "ahead of themselves 200 years ago", it's "ahead of themselves non-stop starting 200 years ago to 50 years ago, when they stopped making falsifiable predictions at all." If "the God of the gaps" is a reasonable criticism, "determinism of the gaps" should likewise be a reasonable criticism.
In the second place, this doesn't discredit Materialism, because Materialism, like non-Materialism, is an axiom. It is not adopted due to evidence, and so it cannot be refuted by evidence. Materialists are comfortable discounting evidence against materialism, because that is how axiomatic reasoning works: the axiom focuses your reason on a specific, collated portion of the data set, and you discount things that appear to lie outside it.
I have control over the actions I perform. I can think about what I want to do, choose between alternatives, arbitrarily rank preferences based on abstract reasons. I cannot be manipulated by others in the way that inanimate, mechanistic, or deterministic objects are readily manipulated. I submit that you and every other person in this forum, and indeed anywhere, understands this meaning on such a basic level that all communication we engage in employs it as common knowledge.
What percentage precision would you say I, or indeed the average person, would be influenceable at? What mechanisms of influence are you aware of that do not leverage the individual's own will, and what level of control do these mechanisms deliver?
For reference, the standard Materialist claims started at the infinite perfectibility of man, the creation of New Soviet Man, the predicted eradication of all poverty, crime, war and mental illness, universal peace and plenty, and the arbitrary, precision engineering of humans to fit their environment perfectly and seamlessly, through rudimentary manipulation of said environment. These results were supposed to be eminently achievable through the understanding their proponents had available to them at that moment.
Put more simply, if your claim is true, wouldn't it follow that the world we see around us is deliberately engineered to deliver roughly these results? Certainly our elites expend considerable effort and value attempting social engineering; to the exact degree that non-voluntary influence works, would it not stand to reason that the results we get match the intention of the influencers?
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I find myself scratching my head at your own model/phrasings of my beliefs/nonbeliefs/“faith” worldview.
Idols exist; one was just beheaded. I assume I’ve misunderstood you. I interpret you here as saying atheism is about believing the events, artifacts, and entities of religions either have none of the powers imputed to them or are references to things which never existed, depending on the thing. Is that a sound reading of your statement?
I don’t believe an idol of Margaret Sanger would have real metaphysical power, nor would I ever think atheists would believe such. It would be an attack on the reverence which progressive atheists have for her, calling them idol-worshipers, a label which, by their own actions and words, they would abhor and wish to destroy.
The way I read this, I believe you assume I am trying to hold an imaginary world in my head overlaid atop the real one, contradicting it at many points of conflict and forcing me to choose obvious lies over simple truths.
Let me tell you right up front that would be far too much work for me. I try to discover reconciliations between every apparent point of conflict between the real world and my faith, and I’ve found only one which really requires me to set it to the side instead of explaining. I have every confidence that my God and Teacher will eventually reveal His answer to me.
As for faith, I hope you’re not referring to the mystical Douglas-Adamsian definition of faith that if the object of my faith is ever proven, I will have lost faith and thus I will be disqualified from gaining faith’s rewards. On the contrary, seeing the object of my faith is my goal and will be a wondrous blessing, and in that moment faith “in things not seen” will become a confirmed belief, a much better thing.
Idols in the sense of the sacred and the profane.
An atheist can erects a statue to baphomet or baal or whatever evil spirit but they can't make it into an idol because atheism is a wholesale rejection of such things.
Basically, when a christian rasis a chross, it is an idol to their god; when a roman raises a cross it is a tool to torture enemies of the state. Atheists having figures of particular note is not the same as Christians worshiping christ, or whatever the fuck the catholics have going on.
Re. Reality maintenance: you are describing maintenance in your post. Having to reconcile things at all is what I am getting at. An atheist doesn't have to reconcile shit; no atheist has ever needed to set something aside.
Re. faith: no, not really. Just that faith is definitionaly belief without proof. You won't know if you were right to have faith until you die; and unfortunately nobody gets to do a quick check in after the fact to let the rest of us know which religion had it right.
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TIL that departments of higher mathematics are, in fact, religious organisations 😁
Just imagine the collective atheistic horror when they eventually prove that 3=1.
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If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
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Then it really is the case that "everyone worships". Theists don't have a monopoly in believing on things that you can't prove empirically. You can't even prove the existence of other minds empirically.
I can't prove it but assuming that other minds exist sure does seem to produce better advance predictions of my experiences. Which is the core of empiricism.
This sounds like a nice demarcation until you realize that it also applies to most long lived religions, and that the things they are making predictions about are a lot more practically useful than what the reason based approaches are concerned with. At least on the individual level.
What exactly is the problem with using with the world model imparted by some religion, in contexts where the world model of that religion has a track record of making accurate predictions and reason does not?
I don’t think there are a huge number of such contexts, but there are definitely some (e.g. "if you strive to be honest and fair in your actions by the standard religious definitions, that genuinely will turn out better for you in the long run" makes good predictions in a tight-knit community even if the "reasonable" position is that you could probably get away with cheating in situations where you don’t see any way that you would get caught). You can of course try to galaxy-brain some reason that what the religion says is actually the same conclusion you would come to using pure logic, but I think "look around and see which approaches work well and which ones don't, and try out the ones that work well for others, and keep doing them if they work even if you don't fully understand why" is a perfectly legitimate approach.
In my experience it's very nice to have a strong-theoretical-model-backed lens you can use to interpret your empirical observations. But you can operate without such a lens, or with a lens based on a model that is known to be flawed (all models are wrong, some are useful).
Well I personally think that's very sound, but there is indeed a problem still, which is that you have to be something first.
There's a specific color to your ultimate epistemology. There is one final arbiter to your internal thinking, one final authority, one personal catechism. And that is one's true faith even as you may recognize other frameworks to be instrumentally useful. When there's a conflict and your belief systems disagree, who wins? Much of the philosophical and theological debate isn't really about the modalities of applying belief systems in the nice conditions where they can be conciliated, but when they can't.
I do not mean to imply that it is not useful to have multiple lenses to view a situation from, it is in fact very helpful. But as you ask what the problem is, there it is: you may see they both have a point, but you can't serve two masters.
I think it's one of those "the hardest decisions are the ones that ultimately matter the least" sorts of things -- if there was some strong reason to choose one side over the other, the decision would be an easy one (unless it's hard because you're missing obtainable information, in which case you should maybe go obtain that information). In my case I'd say that generally, all else being equal, I'm going to go with whatever would sound intuitively right to someone unsophisticated (though all else is not equal very often). I'm not that attached to that approach though -- I have mostly settled on it as a matter of pragmatism, and it seems to be working pretty well so far.
You can't very well faithfully serve two masters but you can totally faithfully serve zero masters.
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I agree. However, if you replace "mind" with "consciousness" then I would say that this is no longer true. Assuming that other consciousnesses exist does not produce better advance predictions of experiences, since in principle it does not seem impossible for a human p-zombie to exist, a being that acts in every way like a human, including having human-level intelligence, but lacks consciousness.
What do you mean by consciousness? I think a model which includes the idea that other people have a subjective experience and motivations that lead to their actions absolutely yields better predictions than a model of other as people automatons responding to their environment mechanically.
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Sure it does! I talk about consciousness, and what I say about it is caused by how I myself experience consciousness. If consciousness exists in others, I expect them to talk similar experiences to consciousness to the ones I have, and if it doesn't exist in others, well then it's pretty weird that they'd talk about having conscious experiences that sound really similar to my conscious experiences for some reason that is not "they are experiencing the same thing I am". If others were p-zombies, then sure all of their prior utterances may have sounded like they were generated by them being conscious, but absent a deeper understanding of how exactly their p-zombification worked, I could not use that to generate useful predictions of what their future utterances about consciousness would be (because, as we've established, the p-zombies are not just reporting on their internal state, but instead doing something else which is not that).
Modeling others as experiencing the same consciousness as I do does in fact lead to better advance predictions of my observations. It doesn't do so in a very philosophically satisfying way if you want to talk about axioms and proofs, but pragmatically speaking "other people are also conscious like me" sure does seem like a useful mental model for generating predictions.
"other people are actually just p zombies behaving as if they are conscious like me" generates predictions that are just as good and as a bonus you get to psychopathically advance your interests without regard to anything except blowback that affects you directly. Leave the shopping cart in the parking lot. Go at the speed limit in the leftmost lane. Drive with your high beams on. Who cares if the NPCs are upset? That's a way better life than actually being pro social all the time.
I genuinely don't think it does. Unless you mean "believing" that in the classic "invisible dragon in my garage" sense, which I don't count as actually belief. Rule of thumb - if you're preemptively coming up with excuses for why your future observations will not support your theory over competing theories, or why your theory actually predicts exactly the same thing that the classic theory predicts and the only differences are in something unfalsifiable, that should be a giant red flag for your theory.
For example: I think that my experience of consciousness is caused by specific physical things my nervous system does sometimes. If I slap some electrodes on my scalp to take an electroencephalogram, and then do some task that involves introspecting, making conscious decisions, and describing those experiences, I expect that I will see particular patterns of electrical activity in my brain any time I make a conscious decision. I expect that the EEG readouts from other people would have similar patterns.
For the p-zombie explanation to make sense, we would either have to say that my experience of consciousness and the things I said about it were not caused by things happening in my nervous system, or we would have to say that those patterns in my nervous system and the way I described my experience were related to my consciousness, but in other people there was something else going on which just happened to have indistinguishable results. And also we would predict in advance that any time we try to use the "p-zombie" hypothesis what we actually end up doing is going "what do we predict in the world where other people's consciousness works the same way as mine" and then saying "the p-zombie hypothesis says the same thing" -- the p-zombie hypothesis does not actually predict anything on its own.
As an empirical matter, I think that if you try rating your internal subjective experience after ripping off a stranger who gets angry at you but who you'll never see again vs your internal subjective experience after helping a stranger who expresses gratitude but you'll never see again, you may be surprised at which one results in higher subjective well-being. That doesn't really have any bearing on the factual questions of other peoples' internal experiences, just a prediction I have about what your own internal experience will be like.
Bro, that's just an illusion due to you smuggling in your non empirical (read: religious) belief that other people's feelings matter. Do you feel bad about ripping off video game characters?
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